Greenhouse irrigation setup, climate control, and growing systems
I walked through a greenhouse in Almería, Spain last year where the grower was still doing everything by hand. He’d walk the rows twice a day with a thermometer, squint at the plants, decide if they looked thirsty, and twist…
Most greenhouse growers I’ve talked to spent way more time thinking about their covering material and heating system than their irrigation setup. Which is strange, because the irrigation system is what you interact with every single day. Get it wrong…
When I visit farms and see a greenhouse that’s been up for three years with yellowed, tearing plastic and plants that look like they’re fighting for their lives, I know exactly what happened. Someone made a decision based on upfront…
If you’ve ever walked into a greenhouse at 7 AM and felt like you stepped into a rainforest, you know the problem. Water dripping off the plastic. Leaves wet for hours. Then the fungus shows up. Humidity is the silent…
A greenhouse without heat in January is basically an expensive windbreak. The glass or poly might trap some solar warmth during the day, but once the sun drops, the temperature inside tracks the outside within an hour or two. If…
I watched a tomato grower in Almería, Spain drain 4,000 liters of irrigation water into a gully behind her greenhouse and thought: that’s not runoff, that’s a second paycheck going down the drain. Greenhouse water recycling isn’t some lab experiment…
Why Hand-Mixing Fertilizer Is Costing You More Than You Think Walk through a greenhouse in midsummer and you will see the same thing everywhere: someone dragging a hose, mixing a tank of fertilizer by eye, guessing at concentrations. It works.…
Why Greenhouse Drip Is Its Own Thing If you’ve set up drip irrigation in a field, you might assume a greenhouse is just the same thing with a roof over it. That assumption will cost you. In a field, you’re…
I visited a tomato greenhouse in Almería, Spain, a few years ago. It was mid-July, 38°C outside, and somehow 26°C inside. The grower had spent €4,200 on a pad-and-fan setup three years earlier. He told me it paid for itself…
A farmer in northern Kenya told me something last year that stuck. He’d installed drip irrigation across two hectares of tomatoes and was still running his pump 9 hours a day during the dry season. His neighbor, with the same…
